Future of secondary services

The secondary services have long been recognized as a vital link in the information transfer chain [Figure 1] that serves to diffuse knowledge from the scholar/ researcher to an increasingly broad and heterogenous group of users. The impact of the ‘information explosion’ at the front end of the chain has dominated discussions on the future of secondary services over the past twenty years, but more recently attention has been focused at the other end of the information transfer chain as new forces for change emerged.